Undead - One Foot In The Grave Part 29

"Slow down, Chris; we're coming up on the highway."

Can't see it! I'm groping in darkness for the cruise control release, for the brake. The steering wheel slips out of my hands.

And I remember-for just one moment-the horror that was waiting for me in the barn. A horror that I thought could not be surpa.s.sed and still survived.

And then I know that there are worse things than the horror in the barn.

They are unfolding even now as the sound of the tractor-trailer's airhorn drowns out Kirsten's screams. . . .

I remember, now.

And, with the memory, I opened my eyes and looked at his face.

It was an old face, ancient, in fact. But not infirm or beset by any of the weakness or dissolution that one a.s.sociates with the aging process. It was a strong face, whole, unmarked by scars or wounds where the flesh had once been burned away from the bone.

It was the face that had looked out the rear window of a black and white, 1931 Duesenberg the night I arrived at the Doman's castle in Seattle. It was the face that looked down upon my death throes in the trunk of a limousine belonging to an a.s.sa.s.sination team from New York. It was the face that waited at the end of that dark culvert I had last found myself in that had spoken just before I pa.s.sed out.

And it was the face that had surfaced from the b.l.o.o.d.y stew, locked away in my nightmare pit of forbidden dreams.

It spoke now.

It said: "Good evening, Mr. Csejthe." My name rolled oddly off of his tongue. "I trust you are feeling better?"

I wasn't feeling better. I was feeling stronger. There was a difference. It wasn't easy tearing my eyes away from his, but I felt the needle in my arm and I needed to look: five plastic packets of whole blood were suspended on a telescoping pole beside my bed. All were feeding directly into my arm.

My eyes returned to that ancient face, to the man standing at the foot of my bed. There was something in his eyes, in his bearing, in the all but visible aura that seemed to surround him that suggested this was a man used to meek subservience and unaccustomed to insolence.

"I've had Monday mornings that were worse," I answered for just that very reason.

He smiled. His lips were cruel-a phrase I'd never expected to encounter outside of a bad romance novel and yet no other description came close. His smile was not a particularly comforting expression.

"I'm afraid you have the advantage of me, sir." I was never one to be content with tugging on Superman's cape when I could spit into the wind, too.

His smile grew broader, revealing the sharpest set of canines I had seen on a vampire yet. "Forgive me, I have been unaccountably rude. I am," he said, executing a slight bow, "Vladimir Drakul Ba.s.sarabthe Fifth."

"Count Dracula," I said.

He clicked his heels. "At your service."

Chapter Fifteen.

"You're the monster in the barn?" Lupe squeezed my hand protectively as she sat next to my motel room bed.

"It was an old farmhouse," Dracula said, continuing his story from the chair on the other side of my bed. "The fire department decided the fire was caused by a short in the electrical wiring. Victor was in town at the time. I, of course, was in my coffin, sleeping. By the time the smoke had reached the bas.e.m.e.nt and penetrated my sleeping chamber, there was no way out except through solid walls of flame. I summoned Victor, but I could not wait for his arrival.

"I was badly burned in pa.s.sing through the flames. I made it outside under my own power. There, my charred flesh was further consumed by the sunlight that my kind seeks so a.s.siduously to avoid."

"According to Bram Stoker," I said, "you were able to go about during the daytime with no difficulties save that your powers were somewhat diminished."

"Bah! That hack? And whom else do you count upon for your research, Mr. Csejthe? Hollywood?

Ellstree Studios? Anne Rice?" The outburst seemed more theatrics than actual temper and he returned to his account as if uninterrupted. "I collapsed just outside the barn moments before Victor arrived."

"The New York team was asking questions about a Victor Wren," Lupe murmured.

"Victor is my servitor and liegeman. He has been with me for many years and I have owed my life to him on more than one occasion." He glanced at an ornate pocket watch. "I wonder what is keeping him."

"So, you summoned Chris to the barn when he arrived," Lupe persisted, "and took some of his blood to stay alive?"

"I was fortunate: I was too far in extremis to take nourishment for myself," he said. "Mr. Csejthe came along at just the right moment. Victor was a medical corpsman in Vietnam and, fortunately, was able to jury-rig the necessary materials for a blood transfusion."

"Unfortunately," Mooncloud said from the suddenly open doorway, "it was sloppy." It was getting all too easy for anyone to sneak up on me. "In the process, Chris was partially infected."

"Sorry we're late," Wren said, coming in behind her. "We were delayed en route to the hospital.

Traffic was backed up on 69 for miles in both directions. Some old guy was standing out in the middle of the highway, naked as a jaybird, and holding a skunk over his head." He shook his head. "You wouldn't believe what happened next. . . ."

Out of my nightmares and in the light of day, Wren was neither formidable or frightening. Of medium height, he had fair skin and long, carrot-colored hair worn in a ponytail that hung halfway down his back.

He looked thirty-something, but a tour in 'Nam meant another decade at the least. Good genes? Or something beyond human norms?"What do you mean 'partially infected'?" Lupe asked as Mooncloud swung across the room on new crutches.

"Well, we know that Chris is stuck in midtransition. That certain parts of the metamorphosis haven't even begun yet-most noticeably, the development and extended growth of a new set of upper incisors."

She lowered herself into a chair and propped her leg, in its new cast, on the edge of my bed. "I've been working on this theory for awhile now, but I can only prove about half of it. For the rest?" She shrugged.

"I'd need to get both of you into the government biocontainment labs at USAMRIID. So, I can only tell you what makes sense based on the evidence."

Dracula-or Ba.s.sarab-signaled for her to continue.

"We've pretty well established that we're dealing with a mutative virus with recombinant effects on human RNA and DNA. We know that, though there is a baseline effect, the actual range of mutations varies from one individual to the next."

I interrupted: "So there's something in my genetic makeup that is resisting or suppressing a portion of the virus?"

Mooncloud shook her head. "I don't think so. No. Based on the circ.u.mstances of your infection, I believe the incompleteness of your transformation is due to the fact that you were not fully infected to begin with."

"Oh," I mused, "kind of like being a little bit pregnant."

"Excuse me, Doctor," our host said, "but, over the centuries, I have taken an interest in diseases of the blood. And, while I do not have a medical degree, I have more than a layman's acquaintance with the subject of viruses." He leaned forward, his face a dissertation on intensity. "One is either infected with a virus or not. A virus may be carried in a dormant phase for months or even years. The effects can be somewhat localized, or the severity of the infection can be graded on some sort of scale . . . but it would be incorrect to say that only part of the virus was at work here."

"Except that it is true," Mooncloud insisted, "if the vampiric condition is the result of a combinant super-virus."

"Super-virus?" someone said. Maybe it was me.

"A virus that is the 'offspring.' " she explained, "of two separate but combinant viruses."

"Wait a minute," I said. "You're saying that the vampire virus is actually the product of two separate viruses-and that these two viruses combine to change the host body to undead status?"

"Ah, a quick study, Mr. Csejthe." Ba.s.sarab steepled his fingers and turned back to Mooncloud. "So, you are suggesting that he received one of the two combinant strains through the transfusion. But not the other?"

She nodded.

I waved my arms, nearly dislodging my own IV's. "Wait a minute, wait a minute, here! I don't know a virus from a bacterium but I think I know enough about transfusions. As the donor, I might infect the count-"

"Prince," Ba.s.sarab corrected.

"What?"

"I was never a 'count,'" he elaborated, "but in the fevered imaginings of hack writers!"

"-but he shouldn't be able to infect me," I concluded with an apologetic nod to our rescuer.

"It was a messy business," Wren confessed with apparent discomfort.

"Aside from that," his "master" added, "vampire blood has some very unusual properties."

"That's true," Mooncloud seconded. "I've seen tainted blood cultures actually move toward untainted cultures on the same microscope slide-the platelets actually seeming to home in on whole, red cells."

"But are we talking about two separate viruses that work in concert, or two phases of the same virusas it mutates?" I asked.

"The first," Mooncloud said, "I think.

"You see, there are four basic effects of viral infection at the cellular level. Some viruses are endosymbionts, existing in a dormant state in the host cells. Some are cytopathic, killing the cells outright. Hyperplastic viruses act similarly, but they stimulate the host cells to divide before killing them.

And then we have the transformative or mutative viruses that stimulate cells to divide in the same manner as hyperplastic viruses but, instead of killing the cells, they recombine with the cells' RNA and/or DNA to produce mutations in cellular growth and reproduction.

"While the final virus is a transformative virus, the two component viruses that combine to produce it are hyperplastic in nature. They survive only a short time outside of a vampiric host as they tend to destroy their host cells and eliminate their own habitat.

"Virus A, let's call it, infects the cells in the bloodstream and as those cells are killed off, they must be replaced with fresh host cells. This is one of the reasons that the transformed body of the vampire requires fresh blood regularly: infusions of living, uninfected, host cells for the virus.

"Virus B," she continued, growing excited as the pieces of evidence were finally falling into place, "is more theoretical as I have never been able to turn up cellular evidence in the lab. I always a.s.sumed that it was carried in the bloodstream like Virus A and that the lack of cellular evidence was due to an extremely accelerated gestation cycle: it reverted it to endosymbiotic status, making it impossible to find a few days or even hours after the initial infection.

"That's where I went wrong."

"And how is that, Doctor?" Our host seemed quite intrigued.

"Once Virus A and Virus B combine, they cease to exist within the bloodstream as separate ent.i.ties.

Virus A eventually returns in its separate form but not Virus B. When the super-virus enters its gestation cycle, it produces a new generation of 'A' and 'B' viruses-like a bis.e.xual organism spewing out both eggs and sperm. Virus A settles into the bloodstream, but Virus B goes elsewhere to roost and wait."

"Where?" I demanded, getting a little fed up with her use of dramatic hesitation.

"The saliva?" Lupe guessed.

Mooncloud nodded.

"It's that simple?" I asked, shaking my head. "Because I wasn't bitten but came in contact with infected blood, I'm half a vampire? Then how come-"

"How come there aren't other instances of Virus A being transferred in the same way?" Mooncloud smiled. "It's theoretically possible. But stored blood would be much less likely to host the virus for any extended period of time. And transfusions with vampires, I suspect, are rare indeed."

I tried to image an occasion where a vampire would offer to donate blood. Failed.

Ba.s.sarab frowned. "But I have heard of viruses surviving for hundreds, even thousands of years-"

"Some viruses, sir. But the apparent difficulties of creating new vampires-even after repeated exchanges of blood and saliva-suggests that this virus is much less hardy than the host body that is its undead carrier."

"You are speaking of theories here, Doctor," Ba.s.sarab reminded her.

"True. But it fits all of the known data and answers a number of questions."

"But," he stroked his chin and turned to look at me, "in theory, then, I should be able to complete Mr.

Csejthe's metamorphosis by biting him, now."

"Now hold on here," I said, easing back against the headboard.

"Only with your permission, of course," he added with a smile.

"Theoretically, yes. . . ." Mooncloud turned and looked at me with a speculative look that gave me chills."It would certainly go a long way toward proving your theory," Ba.s.sarab said.

"Yes. . ."

"No!" Lupe snarled. The hair on her forearms was standing up, and she was positively bristling.

"My, my, I am impressed," Ba.s.sarab remarked mildly. "Even though you are not fully transformed, you command great loyalty in your servitors."

"Mr. Csejthe has no servitors here," Mooncloud said icily.

He smiled. "You are joking. You would have me believe-what?-that you are in charge of this mission?"

I leaned over and murmured to Lupe: "Define this for me-are we witnessing an exhibition of misogyny, racism, or some kind of multispecies/cla.s.s superiority prejudice thing?"

She still bristled, but I saw the hint of a smile and a little of the tension seemed to ease from her trembling frame.

There was more of a smile on Dr. Mooncloud's face as she steepled her fingers and bit back. "Mr.

Ba.s.sarab-or Vlad Tepes or Count Dracula or whoever you claim to be-I think the fact that we are allies," she smiled more broadly, "and you are certainly in need of allies these days, ent.i.tles us to a little more courtesy on your part."

While all of this was going on I was shaking off my emotional lethargy. My black pit of forgetfulness was unsealed now, and ugly memories were starting to crawl out.

"Allies? How dare you!" Ba.s.sarab was standing now, his long, pale features white with anger. "I am the Drakul, Voivode of Walachia and Warlord of the Transylvanian Unity! It was I who time and time again beat back the numberless hordes of Mongols, Turks, and Hungarians, winning victory after victory against insurmountable odds! My name is synonymous with terror, I have outlived my foes and their progeny even unto their great-great-grandchildren! I wield powers and forces that are unknown and unthinkable to mere mortals! I am deathless! To my enemies I am Death!"

"And yet," Mooncloud interrupted, "you are on the run from a carful of thugs."